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Tuesday Feb 03, 2009
Snow day 2009
Yesterday, it snowed. In fact, the news tells us this morning, that on Monday 2 February 2009, London experienced the heaviest snowfall in 18 years.
Now, 18 years ago, I was at primary school and living in a country where it never snowed (at least at my place). However, I can still say with a fair amount of confidence that the working world has changed quite a bit since 1991.
I woke up yesterday morning and turned on my laptop. This is a fairly regular morning ritual – only yesterday, the weather report on my desktop said it was snowing. I looked outside the window and so it was. Then the text messages started arriving, saying that, if we couldn't get in, we could work at home – and a webmail message from the chief executive saying the same.
Working from home is nothing too unusual in 2009. Due to the wonders of broadband internet, I've got access to webmail and the documents I need from any computer with an up-to-date browser. To see what my colleagues are up to, all I need to do is turn on Yammer, or follow their twitter feeds, or send a text message or email.
So, working from home in 2009 is relatively easy. However, working from home on a snow day in 2009 raises a few more issues. And to make things even more difficult, YouthNet has a stand at Skills North West this week – which involved four staff members needing to overcome the public transport chaos to get up north to Bolton.
That's when I noticed that snow has an impact on technology as well. The South West Trains website wouldn't work. The front page of the Virgin Trains website said 'There is currently a good service on all Virgin Trains routes', which seemed pretty unlikely. My mobile stopped ringing: all calls went straight to voice mail. And when I tried to call our travellers, I got a network busy message. So technology's not the answer to everything. Sometimes we still have to wait on hold for half an hour on the Virgin Rail helpline to see if we can change the times of train tickets (I couldn't). And sometimes, we just need have to travel through the snow to the station, talk to someone face-to-face and ask again (this worked).
In contrast, social networking websites come into their own on a snow day. In between writing reports and answering phone calls, it was lovely to see the snowy pictures which had been uploaded by my friends on facebook, by users on flickr and to read the #uksnow reports coming on twitter.
Walking through the common in the evening, throwing snowballs, making snow angels and taking my own pictures, my thoughts turned to how things have changed over the last 18 years.
How the new communications technologies can connect us and make us aware of the bigger picture. And how this has far wider implications than snow.
Posted by Natasha Judd ( 1:22 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
